Three Ways AI Can Help in Your Hollywood Job Search...And Two Ways It Hurts

Whether we like it or not, AI seems to be here to stay. But should you use it for your job search? 

We’ve found that AI is most useful – and most ethical – when you use it as a tool, not as a replacement for original work or critical thinking. When AI works as a better search engine, it can be super useful. But when it replaces a human, it can actually be detrimental. Here are three ways you can use AI in your job search, and two ways you shouldn’t:

Use it to research companies. Some people have a very clear list of companies they want to work for, but most job seekers (especially those making a major transition) have an idea of the types of roles they want, and not who might be hiring for them. We typically recommend going down a research rabbit hole to find companies of interest. But not everyone loves getting lost in the research process, and it can take a lot of time and patience as you hit some dead ends. AI can come in handy here to speed up the process. If you prompt a tool like ChatGPT to understand your background and what you’re looking for, it’ll generate a list of companies you can look into. Don’t rely solely on its suggestions, but rather, use this list as a starting point to dig deeper. Go to the companies’ websites, look up their employees on LinkedIn, watch their content, and if your interest is still piqued, try to get an informational interview with someone who works there to learn more.

Use it to organize and prioritize your contacts. We love a good contact tracker! But they can be a bit tedious to create. AI can give you a head start, whether it’s using the built-in tools in a product like Airtable or asking ChatGPT to create a list for you. You can upload your LinkedIn data and any non-LinkedIn contacts into the tool, and use the AI tool to create a spreadsheet with customized tags and filters so you can easily search your contacts and make an outreach and follow up plan. We don’t recommend having an AI model craft your outreach emails for you, though, as you want to be as personal as possible. 

Use it to prepare for a job interview. The best way to approach a job interview is to have a set of anecdotes at the ready so you can respond to any question with a concrete example that illustrates your particular set of skills and approach. ChatGPT can be really useful in helping you hone these narratives. You’ll want to set the tool up with a full picture of your background. Don’t worry about your writing style as you brain dump your skills, experiences, and proudest achievements. When you have an interview, share the job posting with the AI model and ask it to generate possible interview questions based on your experience, the role, and the company. From there, you can use the tool to brainstorm the right anecdotes and fine tune your answers. You won’t want to recite the answers you generate within ChatGPT in your human interview (though you may for a screening round that’s with a hiring bot), but you can use this as a starting point to organize your thoughts, prepare for curveballs, and build your confidence.

Don’t use it to write your resume or cover letter. A lot of job seekers turn to AI to do the work of writing their resumes or cover letters. After all, an AI-based ATS system is likely reading your resume, so what’s the harm? The problem is that AI resumes all sound alike. And yes, there are some common threads in resume-speak and best practices that you’d want to replicate even if you wrote your resume with your own human self or a human resume writer. But there’s too big of a risk that AI will leave with you with something generic, factually incorrect, or confusing. It’s even worse with cover letters! The purpose of a cover letter is to clearly state your interest and unique capabilities for the job, and you’d have to basically write an entire cover letter in your prompt to get ChatGPT to do this effectively. At that point, you’re better off writing it yourself, so you don’t have to edit out the obvious AI signatures. If you don’t heed our advice, make sure you feed the tool all the possible information it would need about your background, do a really thorough fact-check, and edit the resume and cover letter to make it sound more human. To do this properly takes about as much time, or more, as writing your resume from scratch, so we don’t really see the upside for most candidates.

Don’t use it to apply for jobs for you. There are a ton of services out there claiming they can send your “tailored” resume to hundreds of job postings through their AI agents and maximize your chances of getting hired by casting a wider net than humanly possible. Sounds cool, right? You’re busy, job searching sucks, and this takes away all the tedious, desperation-leading effort! But this is a wildly ineffective strategy. First of all, there aren’t hundreds of jobs you’re qualified for or interested in. You don’t want to run the risk of having a bot apply for role at a company you want to work for but a role that’s not really aligned – if you do that too often, you’re likely to end up on a blacklist. You also can’t trust that the application will really be tailored properly and not hallucinate experiences you don’t have. Plus, do you really want to land an interview at a company you’re not interested in working for? This has been an issue for years with tools like LinkedIn’s EasyApply and Indeed’s One Click Apply. We’ve led hiring processes where candidates used those tools, had no real interest in the role, and everyone’s time ended up wasted. This is magnified by AI job applications. Plus, hiring managers are inundated with these not-so-real candidates, so many are pivoting even more strongly to relying on referrals from their network. It’s a lot harder to generate a referral for a role when you’re not in control of where you’re applying.

The biggest thing that’s going to impact your job search is the human connection -- the people who champion you for roles, the interviewers who want to work with you, and the teams you want to work with. If you decide to use AI in your job search, use it responsibly, and remember to center your search and story on your human self, since that’s what’s ultimately going to land you the role and help you succeed in it.